.:: Yolospat ::.

A few items are on the plate this evenings (er, mornings, how’d that happen so fast? So little time so much to do) blog post. First off, World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm finally has a release date! December 7th. That’s a few weeks after I started playing WoW back in 2005. Wow, it seems like yesterday. I will probably pre-order. I wouldn’t be able to stand in the huge long lines. I’m getting too old or something. So what if I get the game a day late? Amazon is good about sending the game out so you get it on the release day. I haven’t played WoW for weeks, but I think it might catch up once Cataclysm will pick up my gaming time.

I’ve been gearing up for NaNoWriMo!! NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month where one has to write 50,000 words of their novel from November 1st through November 30’s. This will be my first year doing it. I’m excited. You can follow my progress at My NaNoWriMo page. I’m writing a lot of short stories this month, and practicing on some writing prompts I have been collecting over the last year since I missed it last year.

Speaking of missing NaNoWriMo last year, sigh. This is the month of October and in 4 more days will be the anniversary of the day I got married. It’s almost going to be a year since I’ve seen my husband ex-husband. It doesn’t feel possible, it feels like a decade. And the worst part about it is through all the hustle and bustle of getting packed and moved, we never got to say goodbye to each other. The other worst part is that I don’t know when I will see him again. I miss him more than any word I can think of in the English language. Its emotional agony, only worse. I lost my soul-mate and my best friend all at the same time. Adjusting to being a single female living by myself is an adjustment I keep fighting subconsciously. I feel scared much of the time, especially at nights knowing he’s not here makes everything seem empty, but through my art, writing, reading, crocheting, and now knitting, I’m trying to keep myself as busy as possible. I’m so grateful for our telephone calls nearly every night, and I’m thankful we keep in constant communication and we’ve both grown from this experience, and he will always be my soul-mate no matter what happens in the future. The distance is so hard though, just so hard. When incidents happen like they did with “Lance” a week ago it makes me wish I were still in Georgia.

Jonah is a lot better. His face is healing at a remarkable speed. The scabs are starting to fall off and new skin is fresh and pink underneath. My friend David got a new puppy. A miniature Chihuahua named taco. I was scared at first that taco and Molly would butt heads for dominance but it was amazing how fast she took to him. This is the first time she’s meeting a dog smaller than her, it was so cute. David made a funny joke. He said if Molly and Taco had puppies, they would have tamales. Hehe. Pictures coming soon of Taco. I’m also building a computer for David that he can use now that he’s gone back to school and kicking ass with his grades.

I’ve been using my iPad a lot for writing out my short stories and my writing exercises. For some reason I’ve gotten a talent for tying on it. It actually makes me write even more than I do already. I found a program on the iPad called Manuscript that connects to DropBox so I work on it no matter where I am.

Just got home from the vet hospital and a very scary few hours. 

Earlier tonight I was drawing and I kept hearing Jonah’s dog tags jingling over and over in the family room. I went to check on him and a 2 inch by 3 inch area of skin was hanging like a flap where his cheek used to be, and raw bloody muscle was left. I couldn’t tell you all the thoughts running through my head as to what caused this to happen but I didn’t have time to investigate. I grabbed my keys, then grabbed Jonah and rushed him to the front seat of the car. Somewhere between where I picked him up in the house to the front door the skin flap fell off, which I found when I got home.

I called Jonah’s vet and the after hours message said to go to the emergency vet hospital on 23rd by Bank of Choice. I didn’t even look to see if I parked between the lines, grabbed Jonah and rushed him inside. Luckily they were able to pull up his vet records since my vets office is their sister shop and took us right back to an exam room. 

The vet tech was super personable and Jonah warmed right up to her considering the circumstances. She explained to me that he had some sort of allergy to something which caused a bad rash on his skin under his fur. Because his ears cover that area and because that area is in a damp hot spot it made it the perfect breeding ground for bacteria to grow. Since the rash was so bad it only took one scratch from Jonah to pull all the skin off where the rash was to leave this open gaping wound. They had to shave off all the hair on the right side of his face to see how var the rash spread (about twice the size of the raw part) and sprayed a topical steroid spray on it after cleaning it up. I’m supposed to spray that topical spray right on the raw part every 6 hours for 2 weeks. The vet tech said at first it burns a little but to rub his ears right after so he forgets the pain sooner. He’s also on antibiotics and pain meds. 

The poor guy just doesn’t know what to do with the cone collar. He will just stand there and not move. He’ll get used to it eventually, but I feel so bad for him. He is uncomfortable and it’s written all over his face. I’m going to sleep downstairs on the couch so I don’t have to carry him up and down the stairs. I’m not sure how I picked him up so many time when I rushed him to the hospital due to the weakness from Fibro. I’m sure it was the adrenaline from the initial shock. 

So I have him home now and he is snoozing on the rug. The pain meeds mush have just kicked in. The open wound can’t be covered so it heals from the sides to the middle. It has to be so painful, I just feel so bad for him. 

I was worried at first if it was something I either did or didn’t do or I didn’t pay close enough attention to but the vet reassured me that there was nothing I could do to prevent what happened. She also said she could tell Jonah was very loved. When I asked her what she meant she Sid that when she did his physical exam she was guessing he was between 2-3 years old before she looked at his records and saw he was 6 years old and that’s the sign of a very loved very happy dog. That made me feel good. I’ve never questioned if I were a good furbaby Mom, but it’s nice to actually hear that sometimes. Continue reading to see pictures of Jonah’s wound.

Jonah's cheek where the skin fell off

Jonah looks so sad in his cone collar

I had the most uncomfortable, creepy, and downright scary night the night before last. I’ve been in communication with an old friend of mine the past month by communicating via Facebook message and text message. Let’s call this person Lance, to protect identities. He called my cell phone late Saturday night and left this creepy voicemail followed up by a text message saying he was coming over after I had already texted him letting him know I had a headache and was headed to bed.

There are a select few people in my life that are exempt from the “drop by without an invitation” rule, and Lance is not one on that list especially since he has never been to my house. I haven’t even seen him for over 6 years.

So when I find out he’s coming over I get back out of bed and change again from my nighty to a pair of sweat pants and sweatshirt. Lance finally shows up and kisses the back of my neck after giving me a hug. Red flags, bright hot pink flags, all the internal flags our intuition makes was waving frantically inside yet was hoping that it was a one time occurrence.

So Lance sits down on the love seat and takes his shoes off and pulls up his shirt and starts rubbing his chest while he is talking. My flags started waving frantically again. I knew I had to get him out of my house as soon as possible. I stood up and grabbed the keyless remote for my ADT security system for my house and put it around my wrist since there is a button on there that when pressed is a silent alarm to the police station. My thumb hovered over the top of that button the entire time.

I picked up a piece of drawing paper and started drawing waiting for him to wrap up whatever he was saying and told him that my headache was getting worse and I needed to go to bed. To my surprise he gets up and walks upstairs and disappears in my bedroom. Great. That was the last thing I expected him to do. I go outside to smoke in hopes he would get the hint but after the 3rd cigarette he still hadn’t come back downstairs. I call up again and tell him for the second time I really needed to go to sleep and he tells me from my bedroom to come upstairs. In my most stern voice I say, “ALONE.”

He walks out my bedroom door putting his shirt back on and holds up his hands and tells me ok, your the boss. Through the whole conversation throughout the night he kept making these crude sexual remarks that was totally inappropriate. He finally left and I locked every door and window in my house and turned on the house alarm. I was so digested and frightened I didn’t end up sleeping at all that night. Every sound that the house made put me on full guard and I’ve been jumpy ever since.

What really makes me angry and mad is this was supposed to be a friend, and he totally ruined it the friendship with what he did because all trust I had for him is gone. What makes me even more upset is he was my link to the local art community. Well, I don’t need him to become involved. I can do it on my own. Same way I’ve always done things.

I can’t sleep. Mostly due to anxiety over tomorrow. I’m having the nerves in my lower back burned off since all forms of trying to elevate the pain has failed. To be perfectly honest I don’t think the pain in my back is the fibro talking. I’m getting to the point where I can tell the fibro pain from the arthritis pain and my back pain as well as my knee pain are definitely from the arthritis.

After saying that you might think of me as an old woman who’s had her kids which left the nest a long time ago and that my days are spent gardening happy humming in my retirement. When I was in high school I used to think that 30′s were the responsible adults who somehow grew lame and boring the minute of their 30th birthday.

To be perfectly honest I still feel like I’m in my early 20′s because I can’t wrap my mind around how time continues to go faster the older I get. I remember hearing this from my parents growing up and being a child there was no way I could understand it until now as I’m experiencing it. Sigh.

I sometimes feel that I hardly see the dust trails before the second lap is halfway through. I know it is something I’ll never catch again, like I could when I had tea parties with the mad hatter when I was once pretending to be Alice.

Talk about an interesting day. I’m sitting here in my office reading my email this morning, just like I do every morning. Brendan was still sleeping so I was trying to be quiet. Jonah starts getting really antsy about something going on outside which he does from time to time, like when people walk their dogs down our cul-te-sac, or if there is a cat walking by or something so I didn’t think much of it. Then he stands up and desperately starts howling. I notice that the dogs next door are also barking more than usual. I get up and go down the hall and I see this mexican coming in my back door. I see him, he sees me and he bolts. He jumps the porch, then jumps the fence, then runs down to the road where he just walks non-chantantly like he owns the neighborhood.

While this is going on I’m waking Brendan up and I’m dialing the Kennesaw Police Department. They got here in a matter of minutes. At first the cop just wanted to know which way they went and he went walking through the woods toward the area I pointed him to. He came back and pulled back up in front of my house and behind him came 3 other police cars. He told me he was sure glad I called because a house was robbed in the neighborhood right behind me which fit the description of one of the guys I told him about. While all this is going on I’m standing at the very top of our driveway. A lady cop gets out of her car and comes up and says they had caught two males and they needed me to ID them. They pulled each one out of the car and stood them up in front of the police cruiser and right away I knew that was the guy that was in my house. When they pulled the other guy out, I told them that it looked like his hair, but he was wearing white before. When he was standing there he had a green shirt on. They pulled a white jacket out of the cruiser and I told them that was definitely the other guy. As I ID’d each guy they put them in handcuffs and read them their rights.

Brendan and I both had to write out a witness statement about the encounter. We learned that one of the robbers was armed. SCARY! That picture I took was the 4 police cruisers out in front of the house. The two back ones each had one of the robbers in it. The police came in and petted Jonah and told him what a good boy he was. If it wasn’t for him howling in a de-stressed way that I wouldn’t have caught him just walking in. He probably would have had his pockets full or hurt either Brendan or myself. I caught him when he had two feet in the back door leaving the back door open. Ugh, scary!

When the police left all my neighbors had a little get together in the middle of the cul-te-sac to talk about what happened. All of us admitted that we leave our back doors open mostly all the time due to this being such a safe and quiet neighborhood. I also found out that Brendan and I are the only ones that don’t down a gun. I told them if I ever needed one, I knew where to go. Not sure about having one in the house yet. Still undecided about that.

I’m wiped out after being outside for so long without my oxygen and really short of breath. Stupid lungs. These are desperate times and I’m sure lots of safe neighborhoods are going to see this sort of thing. It’s sad, but I guess we gotta do what we gotta do. I’m definitely making sure all doors are locked at all times from now on. This is my house dammit, and I’m not about ready to let them make me feel unsafe in my own house.